Friday, September 16, 2011

Entering the waiting period

It's been over a month since we shipped our dossier to Ethiopia (sorry for the long delay in posting). It was exciting getting it sent off. We celebrated pretty mildly that day by going to our favorite Mexican restaurant before work. They didn't have a mariachi band, but we didn't need one. A whole lot of work was wrapped up in that paperwork and by God's grace we didn't have to redo anything. So now we enter the hardest part - the waiting period.

This wait is going to be longer than we initially thought. We are number 53, which represents our number for just America World. Keeping in mind that there are many other agencies with their own waiting lists, we don't know our ultimate number of all people waiting for adoptions. What we do know is that there have been no referrals in the America World infant boy/girl lines since May, so number 53 sounds very high. When we started the adoption process at the beginning of the year the typical wait was 7 months. Now it may take 18months. This shows how process modifications in the Ethiopia government affect the families waiting for their adoptions at the ground level. This is also partly the cause of the delay in posting as many times the things I do think of writing about only sound like an Eeyore monologue ("53?! That's more than the number of states in the union and I can't even name them all off the top of my head!").

Looking at a long wait will inevitably raise questions for us so we have to remain focused on the fact that God led us here and will lead us through. He wants our focus through the great times, good times, mundane times, and difficult times. He certainly uses all those at His disposal to align our hearts to Him.

2 comments:

Mandy, would you consider a domestic adoption while you are waiting? You'd have to check with your agency if they are okay with that, but some definitely are. There is usually a very short wait time for African American boys (they are the last to be adopted for some reason I don't understand...)

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